In many ways Godzilla is a strange beast. Beyond the fact that he’s a bipedal reptile who breathes fire and stands as tall as a building, I mean. The original kaiju began its cinematic career as a metaphor for the very real, very sobering nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, but it evolved very rapidly into a heroic, monster-fighting superstar with subplots involving time travel and kooky moth cults. It would be tempting to return Godzilla completely to its dead-serious roots with this modern remake, Batman Begins-inating a franchise that had long since become synonymous with camp, but that wouldn’t be very much fun, now would it?

Fortunately, director Gareth Edwards seems to understand that a sense of balance is in order, and has therefore directed a new Godzilla that succeeds in both having its cake and stomping on it too. The first half of Godzilla is human, suspenseful and dramatic, and the second half segues – albeit a little awkwardly – into a series of breathtaking monster brawls that are simultaneously a little ridiculous and also tons of melodramatic fun.Moreover, Edwards succeeds in finding new ways to both show this action in all of its glory and also cut away from it at clever moments. The resulting film manages to deliver all the big crowd-pleasing moments we want from our blockbuster devastation epics and leave us wanting more, in the best possible way. Godzilla gives us all the Godzilla we need; any more would be simply exhausting, just another tiresome parade of video game cinematics devoid of emotion or showmanship.

But before the battle can begin, the stage must first be set. The carcass of an enormous leviathan is discovered at a mining site, but something inside of it has hatched and makes its way for Japan, where Bryan Cranston and his wife Juliette Binoche are running a nuclear power station. Tragedy strikes but… wait, where’s the monster?Anyway, years later, Cranston is a conspiracy-obsessed kook with “crazy” ideas about what actually caused the disaster and his son has grown up to be Aaron Taylor-Johnson, a military explosives expert (just go with it) who is more than a little embarrassed by dad’s outlandish attempts to prove his theories. Funny thing though… when they visit the site of the tragedy, the military is already there and guarding a big glowing monster-looking thing that’s HOLY CRAP RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

What follows is a tour of the Pacific Ocean and its adjacent landmasses that reduces every single city that Aaron Taylor-Johnson just happens to visit to rubble. Coincidences pile up, a scientist played by Ken Watanabe develops a quasi-religious faith that Godzilla will save the planet (for, presumably, reasons),(Download Godzilla) and there’s an ongoing micro-subplot that implies that Godzilla and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are total bros. Towards the end, our human hero is trudging his way through a smoldering San Francisco when our monster hero falls to the ground beside him, and they exchange a look that can only be interpreted one way: “Mondays, am I right?”And yet the striking, ominous cinematography and absolute sincerity from the entire cast makes even the most ludicrous moments in Godzilla seem plausible, if only while you’re watching them.

Godzilla impressively captures the enormous scale of the kaiju genre like few (if any) movies ever have, developing a mostly effective human drama along the way and exploiting the nuttier aspects of this franchise only as much as necessary to make this Godzilla movie actually feel like a proper entry in the long-running series.(Download Godzilla) It’s hard to turn a nigh-Lovecraftian behemoth into a good guy we love as much if not more than our human cast, but Godzilla succeeds without reducing the title character into a cartoon. He is a monster, through and through, but one who defends the Earth when it suits him, and I hope to see him kicking ass on the big screen again and again and again.

More than a decade on from Roland Emmerich's much-maligned Godzilla remake, the news that Gareth Edwards would be next to take the reins allayed many fans' fears. Edwards' textured, haunting debut Monsters embodied everything shoestring sci-fi filmmaking does at its best, coupling resourceful scares with an essentially human story. His priorities here are inevitably shifted,(Download Godzilla) with a studio budget and six decades of franchise history to honour, but it's disappointing nonetheless that the human story in Edwards' Godzilla falls so completely by the wayside. What's left is technically masterful but curiously po-faced, all action without the adventure.The opening set piece promises the very opposite, picking up in 1999 and putting Bryan Cranston front and centre as the film's emotional lightning rod. He's Joe, a frazzled scientist trying hard to avoid coming off like "the American maniac" to his colleagues at the fictional Janjira nuclear plant, where his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) also works.

After a pattern of increasingly strong seismic activity, the facility goes into meltdown and Sandra is killed in the ensuing blast, a predictable early twist that Cranston makes genuinely wrenching. Meanwhile, a team of scientists led by Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins discover the fossilized remains of a monster that will look familiar to many viewers. It's a potent,(Download Godzilla) goosebump-inducing opener that promises heart alongside spectacle.15 years later, Joe's son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has joined the Navy and started his own family with Elizabeth Olsen's Elle, moving on where his father has stayed stuck in the past. Dismissed as a crackpot by his colleagues, Joe is convinced that history is about to repeat itself, and accuses the authorities of hiding something much bigger than nuclear fallout in the evacuation zone. He's not wrong.

Screenwriter Max Borenstein shrewdly incorporates the history of the Godzilla franchise both literally – the year 1954 is significant – and thematically, with the monster's roots in nuclear fallout. "The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way around," Watanabe's scientist muses, and it's this idea that lends real weight to the destruction that unfolds, most notably in one breathtaking Hawaii-set tsunami sequence. But Borenstein's screenplay suffers from a serious structural imbalance – it's emotionally frontloaded,(Download Godzilla) burning through all its human drama inside the first half hour. It's when Taylor-Johnson takes over as leading man that the problems begin; in contrast to Cranston's powerhouse emoting, he's a blank slate. Ford has nothing resembling even a half-hearted character arc, and seems to exist largely to give audiences a face to focus on during the action. Meanwhile Olsen, one of the most engaging actresses of her generation, is squandered in the most one-dimensional wife-and-mother role imaginable.

Edwards delivers several strong key set pieces, combining visual scope and oppressive sound work to create an atmosphere that feels truly panic-inducing without being overblown; one beautifully tense moment set on train tracks is the quietest action sequence you'll see in a blockbuster this summer.(Watch Godzilla Online in DVD, HD) Godzilla himself is revealed in very gradual snatches, and there's a reason why holding back the full monster is the oldest trick in the book – the shiver of childlike glee you'll feel at finally seeing him is worth the wait. But if there's one thing this Godzilla could use, it's a little more childlike glee. It often feels like a very solemn exercise, in which characters are exposition delivery devices rather than people and the stakes are always theoretical. It's an intelligent but rather dour monster movie, its crippling lack of heart mitigated by spellbinding action and a gripping first act.